In this paper, we discuss the unsettled politics of child and youth representation in international institutions. By introducing the collection of papers that constitute this Special Issue, we examine how international institutions empower children and youth through participation and recognition, but also how institutionalized rules, routines, and policy discourses constrain the realms of possibility available to them. While the contributions illustrate how the politics of age and generation underpin IR as subject matter, they also prompt us to think of child and youth representation as unsettled and multifarious. We identify three ‘troubles of representation’ that complicate the involvement of children and youth in global policymaking: (i) the problem of speaking for others; (ii) representative hierarchies and barriers; and (iii) young people’s liminal position in-between worlds. Finally, we discuss how young people’s in-betweenness offers a productive prism that invites us to revisit the politics of representation and identify avenues for future research.

While children and youth undeniably have a stake in and are affected by global migration governance, they have only recently gained recognition as a constituency in global multi-stakeholder dialogues around migration. In this article, we examine the ways in which the mobilization of young people has created new pathways for child and youth representation in the global governance of migration. Based on the analysis of policy documents, interviews and participant observations from the 13th Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) in 2021, we demonstrate how children and youth as a stakeholder group have established new processes to identify policy priorities, select representatives and build partnerships to offer solutions to pressing migration challenges. Although institutional trajectories limit the kinds of representation that become possible, the mobilization of young people has resulted in a tangible strengthening of their access, space and strategic position to represent themselves in global migration governance.

As child migration has caught the attention of a growing amount of scholarship in the past few decades, a new nexus of theorizing child migration has emerged from an array of academic traditions and contexts of migration. The fact that young people under the age of eighteen today constitute around one-third of the around 100 million forcibly displaced persons around the globe has placed the child in the midst of political controversies and global social transformations. At the same time as the pressing challenges of global migration have led to a significant increase in policy, practices and procedures that target children specifically, this has also propelled scholars to explore new methodological and theoretical avenues. The overall aim of the chapter is to examine some of the dominant theoretical approaches to child migration and what their implications are for our understanding of contemporary migration regimes. A particular focus will be on how scholarly work in childhood studies, the sociology and anthropology of childhood and migration studies, what here is referred to as a ‘childhood turn’ in migration research, has largely focused on empirical and conceptual aspects of children’s agency, experiences and perspectives in global migration. Yet, as is suggested, while the childhood turn in migration research grew out of a discontent with a lack of data on children and a dominance of traditional assumptions about children and family, the recent discovering of migrant childhoods in, for example, political philosophy has been driven by normative issues and theoretical trajectories in isolation from the empirical and theoretical achievements in childhood studies and migration studies.

I det här kapitlet ger vi en introduktion till olika former av barn- ochungdomsaktivism inom miljö- och klimatområdet. Vi fokuserar på tre former: 1. barns och ungas engagemang i proteströrelser och i lokalt engagemang, så kallad gräsrotsaktivism, 2. deras representation i politiska institutioner och 3. deras försök att driva klimatmål i domstolar. Vi vill ge en bild av de lokala, nationella och globala förutsättningarna för olika aktivismformer och de strategier och arenor som unga väljer att använda. Genom att fokusera på förutsättningarna för att skapa synlighet för protester, få inflytande i beslutsfattande institutioner och utkräva ansvar genom klimatmål i domstolar, vill vi sätta ljuset på de regler och normer om vuxenskap och barndom som formar barn och ungas klimat- och miljöaktivism. Vi lyfter fram några av riktningarna i forskningslitteraturen, samt använder exempel från vår egen forskning om skolstrejksrörelsen Fridays for Future, ungas deltagande i de globala klimatförhandlingarna och ungdomsorganisationer som driver på för en mer radikal klimat- och miljöpolitik på både nationell och internationell nivå. I den avslutande delen av kapitlet sammanfattar vi de övergripande dragen i forskningsläget och diskuterar dessa i relation till vuxennormer, åldersordningar och föreställningar om barn och unga i en tid av klimat och miljöförändringar.

This text is an exploration of collaborative thinking and writing through theories, methods, and experiences on the topic of the child, children, and childhood. It is a collaborative written text (with 32 authors) that sprang out of the experimental workshop Child Studies Multiple. The workshop and this text are about daring to stay with mess, “un-closure” , and uncertainty in order to investigate the (e)motions and complexities of being either a child or a researcher. The theoretical and methodological processes presented here offer an opportunity to shake the ground on which individual researchers stand by raising questions about scientific inspiration, theoretical and methodological productivity, and thinking through focusing on process, play, and collaboration. The effect of this is a questioning of the singular academic ‘I’ by exploring and showing what a plural ‘I’ can look like. It is about what the multiplicity of voice can offer research in a highly individualistic time. The article allows the reader to follow and watch the unconventional trial-and-error path of the ongoing-ness of exploring theories and methods together as a research community via methods of drama, palimpsest, and fictionary.

In this chapter I explore how children and youth make use of particular strategies of self-representation to seek political representation. I do so by taking my point of departure in a group of young Afghan migrants in Sweden and their political mobilization for their right to residency permits. In dialogue with debates in political theory around democracy and representation, I examine how young political actors contest and recast dominant regimes of political representation to claim political space and a voice of their own. Focus is put on the ways in which various actors struggle over the authority to represent and give meaning to the interests, rights and well-being of young migrants and how these processes of representing children and youth become politically productive. Four different strategies are identified and suggested to constitute a politics of self-representation: Rejecting previous forms of representation; establishing, shaping, and controlling political identity; creating political space; making opponents and allies. Based on these empirical observations, I argue that the mobilizations of young non-citizens against deportation reveal a critical dimension to the politics of childhood, namely, how the strategies of self-representation used by children and youth disrupt current legal and political orders and open up new avenues for political representation.  

This edited volume investigates children and youth’s deep entanglement in today’s major global, national, and local transformations and processes: where in they are not mere spectators and objects of transformations but instead actively shape them through various social, economic, and political representations. International contributions illuminate the problems that arise when children’srights and participation become a site of contestation and power over whorepresents whom, what, when, and where. The authors do not provide simple solutions, instead offering an understanding of the fundamental nature of these problems as founded in the application of rights and the nature of representation in modern society. Together, the authors emphasize that child representation must take into account the local and spatial context of how representations of children are discussed, as well as possible discrepancies between local, regional,national, and global processes.

Recent decades have demonstrated an unpresedented institutionalization and mainstreaming of children and youth participation in international decicion-making processes. In the UN system, children and youth have been identified as on one of the 'major groups' whose participation is critical for effective and just global governance of sustainable development.

I Sverige uppmärksammar vi nu 100-årsjubiléet av införandet av allmän och lika rösträtt 1918–1921. Sedan reformerna i början av 1900-talet har rösträtten och valbarheten utvidgats och fler grupper har getts möjlighet till demokratiskt deltagande. Samtidigt som denna expansion av medborgarskap har inkluderat fler grupper än tidigare kvarstår begränsningar i demokratiskt deltagande för andra. Inte minst gäller detta i relation till de ca 20 % av Sveriges befolkning under 18 år som inte har rösträtt och inte är valbara till politiska församlingar eller som partiföreträdare. Barns och ungas demokratiska och politiska representation har i stället tagit andra vägar. Inrättandet av Barnombudsmannen, Elevombudsmannen och Myndigheten för ungdoms och civilsamhällesfrågor, liksom implementeringen av barnkonventionen i sektorer som skola, vård, socialt arbete och kommunalt organiserade ungdomsråd har tydligt markerat att man från statsmaktens sida sett ett behov av att formalisera representationen av den unga grupp i samhället som inte har rösträtt eller är valbar till politiska församlingar. Vi har i det här temanumret samlat ett antal empiriska och teoretiska undersökningar om barn och ungas egna demokratiska deltagande och hur de representeras av andra i en samtida demokrati som Sverige. På detta sätt vill vi bygga vidare på de pågående kritiska diskussionerna inom statsvetenskapen om demokrati och representation och en växande mängd studier om barn, unga och politik. Vi vill därmed också peka på några av de möjligheter som ett särskilt fokus på barn och unga som politiska subjekt kan erbjuda för vår grundläggande förståelse av demokrati och politisk representation.